How can I stop being average?

Here is what average people do: They wake up at 10am, read some news, eat, watch Game of Thrones for 2 hours, eat more junk food, lay on the sofa and stare at their phones for three hours, and then probably watch more TV and sleep. Of course, there will be variations based on one’s social status and geographical locations - I’m largely generalizing, but this is what most average people do on weekends.

They don’t achieve much. They don’t have goals or plans, and they live everyday without much thought.

This is what I lived like for eighteen years.

Before college, all I wanted to do was get the guy I liked to notice me, or hang with all my friends and go downtown everyday. I wanted to get in a good university but I wasn’t actually willing to put in any effort. I didn’t actually work hard for anything.

You see the trend? I was comfortable.

And that’s where I got it wrong. I indulged in pleasure, not happiness. I let myself do whatever I wanted in the moment, without actually putting myself under pressure for a better future.

In high school, I binge watched Last Man on Earth instead of studying for my bio exam. In college, I ate chocolate and scrolled my Instagram for forty minutes instead of getting a head start on my business project.

Mother of God, what was I doing?

If you want to be above average, you need to get used to being uncomfortable.You need to get used to pain, to discomfort, to prolonged hours of just sitting there and forcing yourself to get through one more page of that fucking essay, one more lesson on code academy.

And in the age of distractions, it’s even harder. Messages, notifications, the allure of multiple social media accounts you gotta keep up to, piled with schoolwork and activities you gotta attend - it’s horror.

But those aren’t real excuses. Everyone goes through them. At the end of the day when you evaluate yourself, whether that’s when you graduate or when you die, you’ll see that nothing is excusable.

For me, my excuse for not working hard in high school was that “my mom forced me too much.” My mom’s excuse was that her mom "turned the TV on too loud so [she] couldn’t focus.”

Bull fucking shit.

You can lie to others but stop lying to yourself. The rest of this break, I want to get ahead on building traction for my blog as much as possible, and figure out what I want to do in the tech industry in the future.

If I say I “didn’t have enough time”, or “I was too tired”, then I’m lying to myself. I’m in Beijing for two and a half weeks and I have nothing to do.

So there. Fuck it. Fuck all the lies you keep telling yourself. If you want to be above average, then you have to be willing to drip blood and sweat for whatever you want to achieve - otherwise, you’ll just be left behind. A mere speck waiting to be extinguished by the trailing dust of the above-average.

Cherry Chen is a blogger at the blunt artist, a self-development and identity blog drizzled with poetry. Check out her website or send her a Quora mail if you’d like to connect.

Source: www.quora.com